Friday, August 15, 2008

Bill Welch has just finished packaging the Style Manual for use in our writing, presentation and communications classes here at Mercyhurst. Bill, an editor and writer with the Erie Time-News for 29 years before he came to us, integrated the practices from a number of other style guides (including ones from DIA and CIA) as well as his own considerable experience to put together a concise manual focused on the essentials of style for the intel analyst engaged in national security, business or law enforcement work.

Partly because he recognized he was building on the shoulders of giants and partly because we are really trying to keep textbook prices down, we decided to make a PDF version of the manual available for free and licensed under Creative Commons so that educators, practitioners and students can use it in any way they need to.

If you would rather have a print version of the manual, we have cut a deal with a local printer and the Mercyhurst College Bookstore to get you one. All profits from the hardcopy sales will go to support graduate student research here at Mercyhurst (Note: Every year our grad students wind up coming out of pocket for various pieces of software or other unique tools to do their theses. Rachel Kesselman, for example, wound up spending 200+ dollars on some content analysis software in order to analyze 60 years of NIEs. While we don't expect this little manual to be a best seller, we would like to be able to defray or eliminate those costs and Bill has kindly donated whatever profits might come from the sale of the hardcopy versions to the graduate research fund).

A big THANK YOU to Professor Wheaton and everyone involved with this project (especially Bill Welch). The free electronic copy is so handy! This will definitely help answer questions analysts have but do not want to ask!